Chapter 12
JENNA
Here is what I want on the record about that party: the moth was not the best costume there.
Danny's boy came as a full-body inflatable T.
rex with a fan in the tail, and he could jump.
He had a friend inside a second inflatable, and the two of them wrestled in the driveway for twenty minutes to an audience.
There was a girl from Karen's side in a store-bought mermaid tail with a light-up scale pattern that cycled through colors.
Somebody's teenager did a genuinely upsetting Beetlejuice with contacts in.
If you'd taken a vote, the moth places third. Maybe fourth.
But the first ten minutes were the ones I'd been afraid of, so I'll say what actually happened.
Nothing dramatic. A cousin's husband said "look at this," somebody else said "did you make that?
", and Lucy said "me and my mom did," in that order, which I noticed and which I'm allowed to have noticed.
Rob crouched down to get the lights at eye level and made her hold still for four shots.
Doreen said, "Oh, is that a butterfly?" and Lucy said, "It's a moth," with real dignity.
Diane was in the kitchen doorway for that, holding a serving fork.
Lucy went straight to her, wings and all, and had to turn sideways to get the hug in. Diane put a hand on the back of her head the way she does.
"Look at you."
"Grandma, they light up."
"So I see."
"Do you want to see the tails? They're the right length. Mom measured off a picture."
"They're very long," Diane said, and went back to the oven.
That was the moment I'd been running in my head for four days — at three in the morning, in the shower, in the car.
Here's the other thing I'd braced for that also didn't happen. I'd told myself on the way over that a homemade thing in a room full of bought things always looks homemade, and that at fifty-one I could handle a garage full of nylon dinosaurs.
I didn't care about it at all, which surprised me.
What happened instead was that four kids under the age of seven followed my daughter around my mother-in-law's house for an hour and a half like ducklings.
They wanted to know if the lights were real.
They wanted to know if she could make the wings flap.
They wanted to touch the tails, and Lucy let them, one at a time, with a warning about the wire.
Then she explained luna moths to a four-year-old for six straight minutes, including the part about not having mouths, which the four-year-old took hard enough that she had to walk it back.
"They choose not to eat," she said. "It's fine. It's their choice."
"It is absolutely not their choice," Rob said from behind the camera.
"Rob."
"Sorry. It's their choice."
She caught the left wing on the door frame between the dining room and the front room at about seven. I heard it — that particular scrape of wire on wood — and the whole kitchen heard her say a word she is not supposed to say.
"Lucy."
"Sorry! Sorry. It's fine, Mom, it's fine."
It was fine. One zip tie had rolled a quarter turn on the spine, which put the wing maybe half an inch off. I fixed it on the floor of the hallway with Eric holding the wing and Lucy standing over us going is it broken, is it broken. Ninety seconds.
"You're going to want to double that tie," Eric said, still down on one knee. "The right one's got play in it too."
"It's been like that since Tuesday."
"It's more than Tuesday." He worked it with his thumb. "Second tie through, opposite direction. It won't roll."
"Do you have zip ties on you?"
"I have zip ties in the truck," he said, as though that were a normal thing for a man to have at his mother's Halloween party, which for him it is.
He went and got them, doubled both ties, and they held the rest of the night.
"That's the second repair in two days," I said.
"It's a prototype," Lucy said.
"It's the finished product."
"It's a prototype of the one I'm doing next year."
Then she went off down the hall trailing two small children.
The tail thing kept happening, which is what you get with three feet of trailing anything in a small ranch house holding forty-three people.
She caught them on a chair leg, on the corner of the dining room table, on somebody's aunt.
Around seven thirty she came past the cider table too fast, and the left tail took a stack of napkins onto the floor without her noticing.
A man I've met eleven times whose name I still don't know picked them up for her.
Twice she came and stood next to me for a minute without saying anything, which is a thing she does at parties when her battery's running down, and both times she went back out.
Once she said, "It's heavier than I thought it would be."
"You want to take it off for a while?"
"No."
"Okay."
"It's good heavy," she said, like I'd insulted it.
Then she asked me to check the battery pack through her shirt. I did. It was warm, which is normal, and I told her so twice.
I ate a plate of food standing up in the kitchen.
Karen's cider was, in fact, too sweet, and I heard two separate people say so to somebody who wasn't Karen.
Diane's corn dish rule turned out to have been correct, because the oven was jammed solid at five thirty and mine was already out and resting.
Diane was polite to me all night. She asked about my mother, and whether I'd used the paprika this year. She told me the thing about the woman with the stroller at the mall again, and I let her tell it and laughed in the right place.
After that she didn't say another word about the wings for nearly two hours, and I watched her not say it.
She'd look, then go do something. She'd be mid-conversation and her eyes would follow Lucy through the doorway and come back.
Once she put her hand flat on the small of Lucy's back as she went past, the way you steer a kid around you in a crowded kitchen.
Lucy turned and hugged her sideways, and Diane shut her eyes for a second.
Eric stayed where I could see him, and he did it without making a performance of it, which I hadn't been sure he could manage. He spent most of the night in the front room with the men doing the thing they do about vehicles, and every time I came through he was there, and twice he looked up.
Around seven thirty I watched Diane say something to him by the stove. Short. He answered. She said something else and went past him with a dish, and he didn't follow her.
I have watched that man follow his mother across a room for twenty-two years. Into the garage, into the yard, out to her car in the rain. She goes off cool, he goes after her, and by the time they come back she's fine and he's spent.
I stood there with a paper plate and made more of it than it was.
Around eight the little kids got taken home, the noise dropped, and people started drifting out to the garage with the space heater.
I was scraping plates at the sink when Diane came and stood next to me with a stack of them.
"You'll want to soak that one."
"I figured."
She set them down and didn't leave. She ran the water and put her hands under it, and we stood there at her sink not looking at each other, the way women have stood at sinks not looking at each other for the entire history of the world.
Out the window you could see the backyard. Lucy was out there in the cold with two of the older cousins, running the length of the fence with her arms out, wings up behind her, those two little moons of light bobbing in the dark.
Diane watched her go by twice.
"The wings move nicely," she said.
I kept my hands in the water. "They do."
"When she runs. They lift." She turned the tap off. "The bumblebee ones didn't do that. Those just sat there like a pair of doors."
"That's true. They did."
"Well." She dried her hands. "It's a lot of wire in that, isn't it."
"About nine feet."
"Hm," said Diane, and she picked up the stack of dry plates and went back to the dining room.
That was everything I got.
For three days I'd been running a version of that night where she said something generous and I said something generous back and the two of us understood each other.
What I got was a seventy-six-year-old woman watching my kid run across a dark yard, telling me the wings moved nicely, then complaining about the amount of wire.
I stood there with my hands in the cooling water. She'd looked at the actual thing. She'd picked out the one part we'd worked hardest on and said so out loud in her own kitchen.
I put the plate in the rack and let it be enough.
At half past eight Rob got everybody into the front room for the group shot, which he does every year and which every year takes eleven minutes because somebody's in the bathroom.
Getting the moth into a group photo is a logistics problem: Lucy had to stand at the end of the row, half turned, near wing angled back, and even then the tail crossed in front of Karen's youngest, who kept batting at it.
"Kid. Do not."
"It's tickling me."
"That's the tail of a nocturnal insect and you'll respect it," Rob said.
Then he did the family ones. Karen's, then the cousins, then ours.
"Morrises. Come on, in front of the fireplace."
Eric put his hand on my back. Lucy came in from the yard with her cheeks red and the antennae slightly bent from the fence, and stood between us, angling her shoulders so the wings wouldn't take out the mantel.
"Turn 'em on, kid," Rob said.
She reached back and hit the switch.
"Okay. Okay, that's good. Hold that."
He took four. In the fourth one, the one that ended up on Diane's stair wall, Lucy isn't looking at the camera at all — she's looking up and sideways at her own left wing, because it was drooping again, with her mouth open like she's about to say something about it.
Eric is looking at Lucy. I'm looking at the camera like an idiot, hair flat on one side, dish soap still on my sleeve.
And my daughter is standing in front of me lit up green and silver, in a costume we made at my kitchen table over six weeks.
I have that picture on my phone. Diane put the print in the frame by her back door in January, and it's still there, and I have never once said anything about it to anybody.